


we are buried in every place we've been

by SunCrossed



Category: The X-Files
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-18
Updated: 2016-10-18
Packaged: 2018-08-23 04:03:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8313307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SunCrossed/pseuds/SunCrossed
Summary: It was sometimes lonely, in that big house of theirs, with all of the ghosts.[My attempt to rationalize the pre-Season 10 break-up]





	

**Author's Note:**

> Pre-Season 10.
> 
> I wrote this as an attempt to rationalize, for myself, the Season 10 breakup. Title is taken from a Bon Iver song: the perfect soundtrack for trying to work through any sort of breakup, including one involving fictional characters.

Most people who know her now would be surprised to know this, but: when she was a little girl, all she wanted to be was married. 

She has always been good at compartmentalizing, but she still remembers those early days so clearly, on the rare occasions that she lets herself remember. She still remembers playing that game with Melissa (Melissa, how can it still hurt so much to say her name, so many years later) – the one where they would pretend to get married to one another. The living room was the Church, their shared bedroom the reception hall, their dolls the guests. She always made Melissa be the groom.

She still remembers, on the rare occasions that she lets herself remember: Melissa, laughing, as she put on their father’s oversized suit jacket, ready to play her role, ready to meet at the fake Altar in the living room. 

She is very, very good at compartmentalizing. She almost never opens that particular box, the one that holds those memories.

Anyway, she'd grown up, hadn't she? The white dress had morphed into white scrubs, morphed into an agent’s gray suit, morphed into a black dress, as she mourned, mourned, mourning. 

She and Mulder never got married. 

It’s something that people might not understand, if they still knew people to not understand it.

Her mother had stopped asking about it. Her friends at the hospital took it as a fact. Her brothers had never asked in the first place.

There were reasons, of course, even some good ones. At first, We don’t want to be found, can’t let a silly license from the state give us away. And then, when they stopped being scared of old enemies finding them, We just don’t need to be married, we have never needed to use words the way other people do, our vows are written in the scars left over from our shared experiences. 

And another reason, and this was the truth, even though she never spoke it: We have lived together for the past ten years, and we haven’t been able to speak about anything important for the past two of them. And, Every time he looks at me, he sees all of the ghosts of the people he—we—could not save. And, I have grown even better at compartmentalizing. 

And the truest statement of them all: We cannot get married, our son and my sister and his sister and our fathers and his mother and our friends, all of those people would not be able to attend our reception. We cannot get married. There are too many ghosts. 

It was sometimes lonely, their not-marriage; no one to bear witness; not their families, not the Church. No piece of paper from the state. No old friends to toast with at their non-existent reception. 

It was sometimes lonely, in that big house of theirs, with all of the ghosts.

* * * * * * * * * * 

On the day that she realized that she had to leave him, they were, for the first time in many, many years, planning to chase a monster. (The fact that she meant a literal monster—or at least the possibility of one—was another thing that people would not understand, if they still had people to not understand.)

She was not sure how he’d found this case; probably the result of the worrisome amount of time that he spent on websites ranging from Wikipedia to scholarly journal databases, as he fell deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. And she wasn’t sure when exactly he had researched it (she told herself that this was simply because she had been very busy at the hospital, and not because lately they circled each other like two ghost ships lost in the Bermuda Triangle), but by the time he told her about it, he had put together six redwelds of information.

Six seasoned fisherman had gone missing, in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Maine. The men’s bodies had never been recovered, but their ship had been found, six days later—off North Island in the Indian Ocean. There was no explanation for how their ship had gotten so far away so quickly; law enforcement was stumped; oceanographers could not come up with any sort of a plausible scenario. But Mulder, apparently, had a theory. He no longer had access to his old files, but he never forgot a case, and twenty-one years ago, a similar case had come across his desk. A canoe carrying two boys had gone missing off the coast in California. The very next day, the canoe had been found just south of Louisiana. He had researched it back then, but his theory had been too fantastic even for the X-Files: it involved a monster, some sort of Oceanus reincarnated, and the tides, and the stars being positioned in a certain way (astrology: something Scully did not believe in). 

Law enforcement had laughed him out of their office back then. She stifled the urge to do that now. But when she opened her mouth to tell him how absurd this was, she’d instead heard herself say, “Fine, Mulder,” their old language. “But please, please, don’t pull out your old projector and show me any slides.” 

And he had smiled, just for a moment—the big smile, the goofy, crooked one, all teeth. 

She’d followed him to the porch, as he discussed ocean tides and how the Romans had believed in the power of the gods of the water. It was sunny, that day that she realized she had to leave him. Sitting on the porch, she swore she could feel the heat seeping into her bones and her freckles spontaneously regenerating. 

She had listened to him talk, had closed her eyes and pretended, just for a moment, that she was thirty-one again. She remembered it all so clearly, on the rare occasions that she let herself remember. Thirty-one was constant fear but also a ubiquitous hope; a feeling that they were still young, still had their lives in front of them, still were moving inexorably toward something, anything that would give all the loss and all the pain some sort of meaning. 

When she opened her eyes, Mulder had stopped speaking. He was staring at her quietly, eyes filled with tears. “I feel like I can’t keep going,” he’d told her, “and I feel like I can’t stop.”

Once, a man named Leonard Betts had foreshadowed a battle to come, had signaled that the end was near. They had fought against it, back then: fought to survive, fought to find the truth, fought to keep moving. But she was not thirty-one anymore; they were not hopeful. Somehow he had fallen into a hole that he could not dig himself out of, and somewhere along the way she had lost the shovel that she could have used to bring him back to solid ground. 

They sat on that sunny porch for a long time. Neither of them spoke the one truth that they were both sure of: that they could chase monsters forever, they could catch every single one, and it still wouldn’t bring back a damned thing that they had lost. 

* * * * * * * * * *

This was the thing about not being married: it made it harder to leave.

They had spent their adult lives, she and Mulder, watching things vanish before their eyes: nine whole minutes of time, giant spaceships and vials of evidence, a man who could squeeze into very small spaces. 

It was her greatest fear, that if she could not point to something tangible—I was married, here, this is the piece of paper that proved it all happened—it would just . . . evaporate. All of the years and the endless road trips, dimly-lit diners and those old, old Bureau cars, the sorrow and the longing and the agony and the exhilaration. She was afraid that all of those years—the years that they were partners, the years that they were “just friends,” the years that they were just-friends-but, the years that they were no-longer-just-friends, the years that they were everything, everything, to one another—would simply vanish into thin air.

If asked, she would insist that it was all real, that there was a man, once (always). A man with whom she lived for ten solitary years. Ten winters, the cold wood floors, doubling up on socks instead of turning on the heat, play-fighting over the warmest blanket in the house. Ten springs, the smell of newly-cut grass, the buzz of the beginning of baseball season (hips before hands, she remembers every year), the feeling that everything was new again, except for them, they were growing older, older still. Ten summers, windows open, the sound of crickets at night, she in his oversized Knicks shirt, watching the slow, lazy sunsets that were filled with all of the vibrant colors that they’d once thought they could emulate. Ten autumns, ten times they ruminated about all the ways they could not start over. 

If asked, perhaps she would say, I am not married, but there once—always—was a man. Two years ago, he’d stopped shaving his face. A year ago, he told me that the darkness was like a blanket that covered his face, so thick that he could not breathe. And: Just last month, I caught him looking at me, tears in his eyes, and he told me, I can’t look at you and not remember. She probably would not say, I am very good at compartmentalizing, but living with one another was like sharing a bed with ghosts every night.

She would not say, there was a man that I loved for twenty years, who I love still, who I could not keep safe, from man or monster or his own brain. 

* * * * * * * * * 

On the day she left him, he did the cruelest and kindest thing she could possibly imagine: he did not say goodbye. He ran out to get coffee; but the tears in his eyes betrayed him; he knew she would not be there when he got back. 

She, too, did the cruelest and kindest thing she could think of: she left him a note. She meant to tell him everything. She wanted to start with how she once had been a child who dreamed of a white dress, how she went to med school thinking she could save the world, how she became an FBI agent (and fine, maybe it partially had been an act of rebellion), how her years with him had changed her over and over again, for better or for worse, in sickness or in death; she wanted to explain how she couldn’t wear black anymore, how she had to be free from the ghosts—they both did. She wanted to tell him: You cannot be free of the ghosts when you share the bed with one every night. In the end, she wrote none of that.

M,  
We saved each other a million times. I am sorry I can’t save you from this. I cannot bury you again. Please take care of yourself. I’ll be at my mother’s, just for now.  
S

She thought about signing it “Love,” but that wasn’t a strong enough word. 

She put on a green shirt: rebirth. She steps out of their solitary house, into the sunlight. She tries to tell herself she is very good at compartmentalizing. But she knows she will carry his ghost with her, everywhere she goes.


End file.
